Published 4:00 am, Saturday, November 8, 2003

In the midst of his praise for Eric Musselman, his coaching counterpart in Friday night's game at the Arena in Oakland, Jerry Sloan had some practical advice for the Warriors. From the looks of the first week and a half of the season, however, the Warriors might already be heeding Sloan's words.

Stability, the Jazz coach said, does wonders for a franchise's hopes for success.

"They never made a commitment to anybody. They fire coaches every six weeks or every six months," he said before the game, which his Jazz lost. "There's a huge difference. With our organization, I'm gonna be there as long as I want to be there. They've already made that commitment, so whether the players like it or not, they know that their agent or anyone else can't get me fired, unless I do something crazy.

"I think Eric has gotten into a situation here where they realize that he can coach the team, and everyone else can do their jobs, and everyone can work together to try to make it work."

No one would know better than Sloan. He is one of two coaches the Jazz have had in the past 22 seasons. He has coached his team longer than any other current coach has been with his team in any of the major American pro leagues -- 16 seasons, since replacing Frank Layden in December 1988. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, there have been 157 coaching changes in the NBA since then.

Seven of those changes, by the way, have been by the Warriors. Musselman is their fifth coach in five seasons.

The Jazz have set a high standard. The Warriors would do well to chase it anyway. There already are signs that they're doing things here and there that emulate winning organizations, not the least of which is going into each game, and each season, with the belief that they'll win.

Sloan knows about that, too -- not that well, though, since for every year until this one he had a couple of players named Stockton and Malone making them tough to beat every night.

Yet Sloan hasn't been convinced that's a good reason to ease up on the reins. Instead of walking away when the two cornerstones left, he signed up for two more years. "I didn't come back just to give up the season," he said. "You have to be realistic -- if you look at the talent, it probably isn't that high. But are you gonna play or are you gonna go home? It's like the old saying -- are you gonna fish or cut bait?"

Both the Jazz and the Warriors -- who similarly jettisoned a ton of talent and restocked on the fly -- are fishing away. Like Sloan, Musselman has made it clear that he expects his team to win even with the multitude of injuries, altered roster, tough opposition and all. "We've been like that since last year," he had pointed out Wednesday night after his team had bludgeoned underwhelming Atlanta at home.

Makes a lot of sense, Sloan said.

"I've never liked the idea that you'd start the season going to the lottery. What do you teach anybody?" he said. "You teach them how to lose, and then when you get to Year 4, you say, 'Now we're gonna go win, we know how to win, we've lost for four years, and now we're going to go win.' I've never thought that was the building (block) for anything except failure."

Friday night's game reinforced the point. The Warriors should have been heavy favorites -- except the Jazz had come in at 3-1. Someone forgot to tell them they weren't supposed to be any good.

Then again, no one told the Warriors they weren't supposed to slip up against overmatched teams anymore. They beat the Jazz like a drum for three quarters, the same sound, aggressive, hardworking way they'd earned their other two wins this season.

The Jazz played hard and fairly smart, but at one point they had three players on the floor -- Raul Lopez, Aleksander Pavlovic and Ben Handlogten - - who not only did not play for the Jazz last season, but didn't play in the NBA at all.

Yet even in a lost cause, down 26 in the third quarter, the Jazz kept the sparse crowd in their seats far longer than they should have. In the final minute, they crept to within five, kept calling timeouts, kept fouling, kept watching the Warriors miss free throws. The Warriors still won, as they should have; the Jazz made sure it wasn't as handy as it should have been.

Sloan had expected nothing less from his team, or from a team coached by Musselman, who he admired for paying his dues and learning how to succeed amidst chaos.

"His team plays hard every night, and that's important," Sloan said, "because the way I see it, if a team plays hard, what else can you do?"

It worked in Utah for years, and still does. If Musselman is around for years in Oakland, maybe it will work there, too.

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